Today I fielded ANOTHER call from a supplier that is frustrated with and challenged to support all the various buy-side e-procurement and e-invoicing solutions of their customers. “We’re a high volume shop,” they said, “it’s not practical for us to log into a dozen different portals to download orders and submit invoices.” To complicate matters, other customers of this vendor use a variety of networks such as OB10, Ariba and Xign. What they and a steady stream of vendors want is a solution for them, is a B2B e-billing solutions that their customers welcome. What they will probably have to eventually settle for is a partner that will allow them to funnel / dumb down/ build up the various buyers formats /channels down to one pipe of information. Lixto software does this in Europe for the auto industry. US-based Hubspan has also recently jumped into this market. But this is just a drop in the barrel for what is needed in this market to address the increasing demand from suppliers. Help wanted . . . . .

PEPPOL (Pan European Public Procurement) is a 30 million Euro EU pilot project with 18 partners from 12 countries. This pilot will go into production from May 2010 with a complete Internet based infrastructure for secure and reliable exchange of business documents. Standardized business processes and business documents are furthermore being implemented based on UN/CEFACT and OASIS standards. PEPPOL will pilot exchange of catalogues, order and invoices and more than 30,000 public sector buyers will be available on this infrastructure. This is the best shot we have at an infrastructure for interconnecting service providers across the world. This is not just a European thing! Go to our free 3-day conference in Malmo, Sweden in February next year. This is all about standards and forcing the market to convergence. Join up and we will succeed.

We were recently working on a vendor RFP wherein the vendor themself is the biggest ERP vendor who was looking for such a solution! We are unsure whether to build such a solution this in our offering in a full blown way or partner with vendors offering Supplier Networks and Payment Networks and integrate a ramped down scale of our build with these networks. Again we need to take a call on how many such networks we can leverage and integrate with us? (Say ASN, OB10 et al on the eInvoicing side and OB10, Xign, Amex Harbor Payment kinda eBilling / ePayment networks). We could not build a credible response as we could not arrive at the conculsion though we have the technology capability for all the above choices! ROI, Budget, Business case et al… stopped us from proceeding further

[…] of Supplier ERP IntegrationPosted by Margaret on November 16, 2009Gartner analyst Debbie Wilson posted an interesting blog last week that brings to the surface a growing issue with ERP applications — lack of interoperability. […]

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